Ah, it’s the great cycle of Java life: everything begins all shiny and cross-platform, because isn’t that was Java is all about, with the writing once and running everywhere? But then all the individual platforms demand special attention, and all of the sudden you’ve got lots of almost but not quite compatible subspecs. In the mobile Java space, developers have had to contend with MIDP, CDLC, and CDC. The actual (as opposed to preview) release today of LWUIT will hopefully paper over some of those divisions. “This software also will help address the mobile industry’s fragmentation issue by enabling developers to create a single interface that will work anywhere Java is found,” says Craig Gering, Sun’s embedded Java software head. As for the back-end code, well, you’ll probably still have to do some tweaking, I guess? Though I imagine that it was always the UI code that was hardest to port. Of note is that Sun released the toolkit under version 2 of the GPL. The Register speculates that the aim is to get it out there on as many devices as possible as quickly as possible, including on Linux-based platforms like LiMo and Android. Software Development